Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (85 page)

In Vienna the more pressing concern of March 1809 was Austria's latest declaration of war on France. Napoleon was at the zenith of his career, absolute dictator of his country and unrivaled on the battlefield. In 1806, he imposed the Continental System on his territories, the massive—and generally ineffective—blockade of Britain. He had neutralized the Russians by an arrangement with Tsar Alexander, and controlled most of the German states under the Confederation of the Rhine. His brother Louis ruled Holland; brother Jérôme, Westphalia; brother Joseph, Spain; and a stepson, most of Italy. Pope Pius VII had excommunicated Napoleon and stood as a powerful voice of resistance in Italy. To address that problem, in July 1809, French troops broke into the Vatican and kidnapped the pope. He was held in luxurious exile for five years.

The new coalition against the French joined Austria and Great Britain, with the support of occupied but rebellious Spain. A familiar story commenced. Once again the French army marched toward Vienna, once again the imperial family and much of the aristocracy packed up and fled. Among them was Archduke Rudolph. Beethoven drafted a sonata movement as an affectionate farewell, calling it
Das Lebewohl
, “The Farewell.” He waited until after Rudolph returned to finish more movements.

As the French neared Vienna, Rudolph's brother Archduke Maximilian proposed to defend the city with sixteen thousand troops, one thousand conscripted students and artists, some militia, and other rags and tatters of forces. Reaching the walls of the city, the French demanded surrender. Maximilian declined. The French parked twenty howitzers on the heights of the Spittelberg and began shelling. Once again the Viennese sprinted for cover in vaults and cellars. Vienna had cannons on the bastions of the town, but apparently they never fired a shot. During the barrage, Beethoven retired to brother Carl's basement, where he huddled miserably with pillows over his ears as explosions lit up the city.

Meanwhile Napoleon ordered a bridge of boats over the Danube, and his troops entered town by way of the Prater park, outside the walls.
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After a day's charade of resistance the white flag went up on the walls of Vienna. By May 13, Napoleon was back in his old headquarters in the emperor's summer palace at Schönbrunn. A Count Andréossy issued a proclamation to the Viennese: “An aggression as unjust as unforeseen, and the chances of war have brought before your eyes for the third time, the Emperor
NAPOLEON
, King of Italy, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine . . . I shall prove myself to be faithful to his plans . . . striving incessantly for the maintenance of order, for the repression of all unjust acts, and in a word, for all that will assure your tranquility.”
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This second French occupation was again relatively gentle, unlike in Spain where the French met fierce resistance and atrocities were ongoing on both sides. In Vienna the French were quick to impose not only restrictions but pointed new freedoms. A newspaper notice said, “All persons who have forbidden books on deposit at the former Censorship Bureau may now claim them.” Banned plays, including Schiller's
Don Carlos
and
Wilhelm Tell
and Goethe's
Egmont
, returned to the Viennese stage.
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There were relatively few casualties in the bombardment of Vienna. They included a perhaps delayed one. On May 12 a shell exploded outside Haydn's house with a concussion that shook the place and scared the wits out of his servants. The old man heaved himself up and cried defiantly, “Children, don't be frightened. Where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you!” But the shock left him prostrate. On May 26, in the new occupation, a French officer called and in a strong voice sang him an aria from
The Creation
. In tears, Haydn declared that he had never heard it sung so beautifully. Later that day he assembled the household and, at the piano, played for them, three times over, with all the passion he had left in him, his simple and eloquent Austrian anthem. The next day he took to bed, whispering, “Children, be comforted, I am well,” and began to drift in and out of consciousness. Haydn died peacefully on May 31, at seventy-seven.
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He had been an honorary member of the French Institute of Arts and Sciences, and many French soldiers and officers were in the funeral train. In the ceremonies at the Schottenkirche the music was the Requiem of his beloved friend Mozart.
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Now, Beethoven was the only peer of Haydn alive. And only now did he begin to speak with admiration of his teacher.

 

During the occupation Beethoven was visited by a music-loving French diplomat, Baron de Trémont, who found the composer in a good mood. He reported the visit in a memoir. Before going to Vienna, he had asked Luigi Cherubini in Paris for a letter of introduction. “I will give you one to Haydn,” Cherubini said, “and that excellent man will make you welcome, but I will not write to Beethoven. I should have to reproach myself that he refused to receive someone recommended by me. He is an unlicked bear!” Beethoven's once-inseparable Bonn friend Anton Reicha, now also in Paris, wrote a letter for Trémont but warned that Beethoven hated the French and was, moreover, “morose, ironical, misanthropic.”

Once in Vienna, Trémont set out for the visit with little hope of success. To make things worse, when he reached Beethoven's street he found French troops trying to blow up stretches of the city walls under Beethoven's windows.
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Neighbors gave the French officer directions but warned, “He is at home . . . but he has no servant at present, for he is always getting a new one, and it is doubtful whether he will open.” After Trémont had rung Beethoven's bell three times and was about to give up, the door opened and “a very ugly man of ill-humored mien” asked what he wanted.

“Have I the honor of addressing M de Beethoven?” Trémont asked.

“Yes, Sir!” Beethoven answered in German. “But I must tell you that I am on very bad terms with French!” Hoping Beethoven meant the language, not the people, Trémont assured him that his German was equally bad. For some reason, Beethoven let him in. They spent the next hours talking pidgin German and French, the Frenchman shouting because of Beethoven's bad hearing. Trémont observed a good deal and wrote one of the most vivid firsthand descriptions of the Beethoven household style (worse than usual at that point because he had no servant):

 

Picture to yourself the dirtiest, most disorderly place imaginable—blotches of moisture covered the ceiling; an oldish grand piano, on which the dust disputed the place with various pieces of engraved and manuscript music; under the piano (I do not exaggerate) an unemptied chamber pot; beside it, a small walnut table accustomed to the frequent overturning of the secretary placed upon it; a quantity of pens encrusted with ink . . . then more music. The chairs, mostly cane-seated, were covered with plates bearing the remains of last night's supper, and with wearing apparel, etc.

 

Taken with this enemy diplomat or anyway intrigued by him, Beethoven invited Trémont back several times and spent hours improvising for him at the piano. “I maintain,” Trémont recalled, “that unless one has heard him improvise well and quite at ease, one can but imperfectly appreciate the vast scope of his genius.” They talked philosophy, Greek and Latin authors, and Shakespeare, “his idol.” Trémont noted Beethoven's style of conversation, animated and full of singular conceits—always on, always thinking and shaping to his own designs: “Beethoven was not a man of
esprit
, if we mean by that term one who makes keen and witty remarks . . . His thoughts were thrown out by fits and starts, but they were lofty and generous, though often rather illogical.”

Their conversations showed that Beethoven had never stopped thinking about the man whose name he removed from the Third Symphony: “His mind was much occupied with the greatness of Napoleon, and he often spoke to me about it. Through all his resentment I could see that he admired his rise from such obscure beginnings.” The baron tried to get Beethoven to agree to a French visit, which he had the power to facilitate. Beethoven said he was tempted, but produced a row of objections that Trémont tried to answer. Finally, they shook hands on the promise of a visit. Then the baron's work took him away from Vienna for good, war continued, and Beethoven never got to France.
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In July 1808, Napoleon inflicted a devastating defeat on the Austrians at Wagram, smashing the fifth coalition against him. In an all-out battle between the two largest armies in European history, the Austrians lost fifty thousand killed or wounded. Having been lenient in his previous victories, with the ensuing Treaty of Schönbrunn Napoleon intended to cripple and humiliate this enemy that would not stay prostrate. He demanded a massive indemnity that would necessitate imposing new taxes on an Austrian population already reeling from inflation. Bits of Austria including Salzburg and the southern Tyrol were hacked off and taken over by France and its subject states. Austria was required to join the Continental System.

All this impacted everyone in the country, including artists. But inevitably some profited from the war, and that included Ludwig's brother Johann, who had spent his last florins to buy a pharmacy in Linz. He secured some contracts to furnish the French army with medical supplies and from them made a small fortune.

Still, in victory Napoleon did not unseat the Habsburgs. After all, now he was at the peak of his power and confidence, made emperor by his own hand, and really lacked only two things: a truly unshakable grip on the Continent, and an heir to take the throne of France. Napoleon's wife, Josephine, had been unable to conceive. He attacked both problems in a startling but characteristic way: he made himself part of the Habsburg family.

In 1810, having brought Austria to heel, Napoleon put Josephine aside and married Marie Louise, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Emperor Franz I. “I am marrying a belly,” he observed with incomparable cynicism.
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Already wed by proxy, Marie Louise arrived in Paris with three hundred attendants in eighty-three equipages. Napoleon all but raped her on the stairs leading up to the nuptial chamber. (He claimed that her response to this greeting was, “Do it again.”) Yet somehow their union turned out affectionate. Marie Louise gave him the son he demanded, François Joseph Charles Bonaparte.

If Beethoven's response to the shelling, occupation, and military defeat of Austria was mostly related to himself, he was not entirely oblivious to the general suffering. Having finally succeeded in placing major works with Breitkopf & Härtel, he began writing Gottfried Härtel as if the publisher were a friend and confessor. After finishing the Fifth Piano Concerto in April, Beethoven found himself at loose ends. He wrote Härtel a long, rambling letter:

 

You are indeed mistaken in supposing that I have been very well. For in the meantime we have been suffering misery in a most concentrated form. Let me tell you that since May 4th I have produced very little coherent work, at most a fragment here and there . . . The existence I had built up only a short time ago rests on a shaky foundation—and even during this last short period I have not yet seen the promises made to me completely fulfilled—So far I have not received a farthing from Prince Kinsky, who is one of my patrons . . . What a destructive, disorderly life I see and hear around me, nothing but drums, cannons, and human misery in every form . . . I had begun to have a little singing party at my rooms every week—but that accursed war put a stop to everything.
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At the singing parties he and his friends had been going through repertoire, Beethoven looking not only for pleasure but for ideas. In the letter he asks Härtel for scores from the publisher's catalog and offers to pay for them—whatever Härtel has of Haydn's masses. He asks Härtel to send greetings to a writer he admires, adding, “One thing more: there is hardly a treatise which could be too learned
for me
. I have not the slightest pretension to what is properly called erudition. Yet from my childhood I have striven to understand
what the better and wiser people
of every age were driving at in their works. Shame on an artist who does not consider it his duty to achieve at least as much—” There is no exaggeration in that. He had always sought out the best of its kind, in every medium.

Instead of the regular and comfortable income Beethoven had hoped for from the annuity, his patchwork career continued. He sent the finished score of the Fifth Piano Concerto to Breitkopf & Härtel in April 1809, and in November received new editions from the same publisher of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the op. 70 Trios. (He found everything distressingly error-ridden.) Meanwhile, another publisher stepped up with an offer of piecework not extravagantly paid but at least steady. Scottish publisher George Thomson, having stalked Beethoven for years, sent him forty-three mostly Welsh and Irish folk songs that Beethoven had agreed to arrange, including preludes and postludes and parts for optional violin and cello. Thomson noted in his letter that he had sent twenty-one melodies to Beethoven nearly three years before but had no idea whether they were received.

Likely what most appealed to Beethoven about the folk-song settings was the idea of something regular in the midst of his freelance uncertainties, which were particularly unpleasant at this point. Prince Kinsky had not paid his part of the annuity (his being the largest contribution), and Beethoven still had not been paid for the six pieces Clementi published three years before. Clementi was outraged about the delay, writing his business partner, “A most shabby figure you have made me cut in this affair!—and with one of the foremost composers of this day!”
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Beethoven finally received his money from Clementi in 1810.
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